Prebendary of Durham Cathedral, rector of the nearby Brancepeth parish, and member of Bishop Neile's proto-Laudian circle, in the mid-1620s John Cosin (1595–1672) spearheaded the reintroduction of choral polyphony, altar candles, chancel screens, and suchlike embellishments—and got into a good deal of puritan hot water for doing so. In 1660, at his return from Interregnum exile, Cosin was made bishop of Durham, where he presided over an extensive architectural program that included restoring the episcopal castles at Durham and Auckland, designing Durham's Palace Green, building its almshouses and library, and refurbishing the Cathedral. Adrian Green's Building for England is the first book-length study of Cosin's architectural achievements, a study that, in the words of the jacket flap, attempts to situate Cosin's “architecture in the context of his religious and political outlook”: in particular, his “theology of free will and pursuit of the ‘beauty of holiness,’” and his “authoritarian” social vision.

Since Green is primarily an architectural historian, one neither expects nor demands a specialist's familiarity with the theological details, yet the book seems alarmingly fuzzy regarding even the basics. It thus several times implies that the Eucharist was the Caroline church's sole sacrament, once even suggesting that Cosin had the baptismal font removed to the west end of the nave so that it would be “at the greatest distance from the rites of the sacraments performed at the high altar” (45; see also 31, 39). The book likewise repeatedly identifies Calvinism with a belief in predestination and the high church position with the affirmation of free will, an affirmation Green terms “Arminianism” (12–13, 45). Yet virtually all Western Christians since the fourth century, including Arminians, avow some sort of predestination. The Arminian view, which makes predestination hinge on divine foresight of faith, differs significantly from Calvinism's double absolute predestination, but both reject the Pelagian claim for the sufficiency of free will in matters of salvation. It is not clear, moreover, that there was a high church stance on predestination; and Green provides no evidence that Cosin declared himself on the issue.

Such absence of evidence turns out to be pervasive. The book's claims regularly lack an accompanying footnote. Some of the unsupported claims are relatively minor: for example, that Cosin was not elected full fellow at Caius because he refused “to bend in theological disputes” with his elders (10) or that his 1664 rebuilding of the Durham courthouse failed “to please the guildsmen” (87). Others, however, are central to an understanding of Cosin's architectural vision and moral character. As to the first, the book repeatedly avers, without a shred of documentation, that Cosin viewed architecture as having sacramental, or perhaps magical, efficacy: that for him the “real presence of the Holy Spirit” was not only “signified” but “brought forth by the gilding and carving” (39; see also 12, 23, 97). As to the second, the book's final chapter accuses Cosin of “elaborate deceit” and “dishonesty” for claiming to have built St. Peter's chapel at Auckland, whereas what he really did was transform its medieval banqueting hall into a chapel (97–98). Green provides no information as to where Cosin made this misleading claim: if it were part of a padded invoice, “dishonest” might well be the right label. However, his comment that Cosin “deliberately sought to mislead contemporaries in his correspondence, which he knew would be read by posterity” implies that the claim occurred in a letter (98). This seems odd. A bit of hyperbole in a private letter does not usually qualify as dishonesty. Furthermore, on what basis would Cosin have known, or even suspected, that his correspondence would be read by posterity? In the 1660s, when he presumably made this exaggeration, had the correspondence of any English divine ever been published? Cosin's letters were, of course, eventually printed, but not for two centuries.

Yet some missing footnotes and theological imprecision would have been easily forgiven had the book offered a coherent account of Cosin's architectural project. Yet it is precisely on this topic that Building for England proves most confusing, since from beginning to end it waffles on the relation between architecture and ideology. On the one hand, it repeatedly argues that “the details of [Cosin's] architecture cannot simply be associated with a particular ideology since those with different political and religious convictions built in similar ways” (6), nor, more generally, can one distinguish Laudian from non-Laudian styles, there being no “neat fit between architecture and ideology in seventeenth-century England” (27; see also 29, 84). On the other hand, the book also repeatedly speaks of an “Arminian aesthetic agenda” (103), an “Arminian vision” of church architecture (33), of architecture as the “visceral materialization of beliefs” (12), and of Cosin's architecture as embodying his high church “ideas and values” (48). While at one point Green describes this Arminian aesthetic as “bravura redecoration of churches” that sought “to restore some of the richness of pre-Reformation worship” (12), elsewhere he rightly notes that “architectural enrichment was not . . . the exclusive preserve of Arminian churchmen,” since several Oxford colleges got splendidly refurbished by anti-Laudians (29). In the end, the only architectural feature consistently associated with high churchmanship is, not surprisingly, the preference for altars over communion tables. The elaborately carved woodwork that has typically been viewed as Cosin's signature aesthetic, however, falls victim to myriad incompatible redescriptions. Referred to at one point as “Arminian woodwork” (44), the book later suggests that it may instead derive from craft practices of local artisans (67), or carry on “an old English tradition” (70), or imitate continental Renaissance pattern books (16, 69), or merely embody a widespread “cultural predilection for rich carving and ornament” (83–84).

Yet the book does provide a valuable account of Cosin's architectural activities, which have long exercised art historians because of the confusion that surrounds their dating. Green has thrown much needed light on when Cosin erected or enhanced his many buildings, and on his interactions with local craftsmen (including his Quaker master mason) as well as with his northern clerical friends to change the face of the church in County Durham.Particularly striking is Green's discovery that, although Cosin built to magnify the power and splendor of the English Church (which is what Green means by its “authoritarianism”), he “did not lavish particular style” on his own relatively modest rectory (35).